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albert cossery

Showing 1 - 12 of 12 results for “albert cossery
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  • The Colors of Infamy

    Translated by Alyson Waters ...
    A delightful, deeply funny novel about the triumph of the perfect prankster — an elegant gentleman pickpocket in Cairo.His eyes “shine with a glimmer of perpetual amusement”; his sartorial taste is impeccable; Ossama is “a thief, not a legitimated thief, such as a minister, banker, or real-estate developer; he is a modest thief.” He knows “that by dressing with the same elegance as the licensed ... Read more

    $10.09 USD

  • Laziness in the Fertile Valley

    Translated by William Goyen ...
    A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile"Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery’s biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle — slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • A Splendid Conspiracy

    Three friends in a small Egyptian city celebrate idleness, elegance, and joie de vivre.Summoned home to Egypt after a long European debauch (disguised as “study”), our hero Teymour—in the opening line of A Splendid Conspiracy—is feeling “as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.” Poor Teymour sits forlorn in a provincial café, a far cry from his beloved Paris. Two old friends, however, rescue him ... Read more

    $11.59 USD

  • The Jokers

    Translated by Anna Moschovakis ...
    Who are the jokers?The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set.The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Proud Beggars

    Translated by Thomas W. Cushing ...
    Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery’s wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the most materially impoverished life.Chief among Cossery’s proud beggars is Gohar, a former professor turned whorehouse accountant, hashish aficionado, and ... Read more

    $10.99 USD

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  • Cairo Modern

    In Naguib Mahfouz's suspenseful novel a bitter and ambitious nihilist, a beautiful and impoverished student, and a corrupt official engage in a doomed ménage à trois.Cairo of the 1930s is a place of vast social and economic inequities. It is also a time of change, when the universities have just opened to women and heady new philosophies imported from Europe are stirring up debates among the young ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Dreams

    Translated by Raymond Stock ...
    In his final years, Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz distilled his storyteller's art to its most essential level. Written with the compression and power of dreams, these poetic vignettes, originally collected in two books, The Dreams and Dreams of Departure, here combined in one volume for the first time.These stories telescope epic tales into tersely haunting miniatures. A man finds his ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Mirage

    A stunning example of Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz’s psychological portraiture, The Mirage is the story of an intense young man who has been so dominated by his mother that her death sets him dangerously adrift in a world he cannot manage alone.Kamil Ru’ba is a tortured soul who hopes that writing the story of his life will help him gain control of it. Raised by a mother who ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Out of Place

    A Memoir

    **WINNER OF THE NEW YORKER BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION • From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • The Seventh Heaven

    Supernatural Tales

    Translated by Raymond Stock ...
    Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz draws on his homeland’s rich engagement with the afterlife–and his own near-death experience at the hands of a would-be assassin–in these newly translated, brilliantly mysterious stories of the supernatural.Among those who haunt these tales are the ghosts of Akhenaten, Woodrow Wilson, and Gamal Abd al-Nasser, who endure a strange system of earthly probation ... Read more

    $6.99 USD

  • Midaq Alley

    Widely acclaimed as Naguib Mahfouz's best novel, Midaq Alley brings to life one of the hustling, teeming back alleys of Cairo in the 1940s. From Zaita the cripple-maker to Kirsha the hedonistic cafe owner, from Abbas the barber who mistakes greed for love to Hamida who sells her soul to escape the alley, from waiters and widows to politicians, pimps, and poets, the inhabitants of Midaq Alley ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Khan al-Khalili

    Khan al-Khalili, by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, portrays the clash of old and new in an historic Cairo neighborhood as German bombs fall on the city.The time is 1942, World War II is at its height, and the Africa Campaign is raging along the northern coast of Egypt. Against this backdrop, Mahfouz’s novel tells the story of the Akifs, a middle-class family that has taken refuge in Cairo ... Read more

    $7.99 USD